[HN Gopher] Gibbard's Theorem vs. Stable Matching
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       Gibbard's Theorem vs. Stable Matching
        
       Author : gbrown_
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2021-06-03 09:10 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cdsmithus.medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cdsmithus.medium.com)
        
       | dane-pgp wrote:
       | > Gibbard's theorem assumes that each participant has a set of
       | preferences about the _entire_ outcome of the process. In this
       | case, the outcome of the process is the matching of _all_
       | candidates to _all_ positions.
       | 
       | Doesn't this mean it's actually not very applicable to voting
       | systems?
       | 
       | Voters generally only care whether their preferred candidate
       | comes first, not about the relative ordering of the other
       | candidates.
       | 
       | I suppose a voter might care how close their preferred candidate
       | came to winning (or their margin of victory), but that's still a
       | slightly weaker requirement than having a total ordering of all
       | candidates relative to each other.
        
         | cdsmith wrote:
         | Author here. No, it doesn't mean that. If the election is held
         | to determine who wins, then the outcome is who wins, and
         | everyone has opinions about that same outcome.
         | 
         | Contrast this to the matching problem, where the outcome is
         | where ALL the candidates are assigned. You're allowed to have
         | an opinion about where _you_ are assigned. I 'm allowed to have
         | an opinion about where _I_ am assigned. These opinions might
         | conflict indirectly because of limited spots, but they don 't
         | conflict directly. This is very different from the election
         | case, where if you and I have different opinions about who we
         | want to win, those opinions are always contradictory.
        
           | dane-pgp wrote:
           | What if an election is held to determine a set of two
           | "finalists"? People might disagree about who the top two
           | candidates are, but they might be satisfied as long as one of
           | their top preferences makes it through to the second round.
           | 
           | Obviously once there are two candidates remaining, Gibbard's
           | Theorem doesn't apply, so I'm guessing that any procedure
           | which reduces the set to two outcomes must itself be subject
           | to strategy, but it would be interesting if allowing people
           | to cast a separate vote in a run-off election was enough to
           | make the first round no longer require strategy.
        
         | bo1024 wrote:
         | There are versions of Gibbard's theorem for outputting a single
         | winner too. The famous one is Gibbard-Satterthwaite:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_...
        
         | svcphr wrote:
         | You can have weak inequalities in the preferences over
         | alternatives -- e.g. you're indifferent between all rankings
         | where your preferred candidate is number 1
        
       | bo1024 wrote:
       | The final note is important, otherwise the statement of Roth's
       | result is misleading. The X-proposing version of deferred
       | acceptance is strategyproof for X's, but not for the other side
       | (the Y's). For example in the national residency matching
       | program, it's (roughly) strategyproof for doctors but not for
       | hospitals.
        
         | bhl wrote:
         | When I was taught stable matching, there was a homework problem
         | on showing that the algorithm is "proposer-optimal" and
         | "proposee-pessimal", meaning that a proposer always does the
         | best they can do relative to other proposers' preferences while
         | proposees do the worst.
         | 
         | The crucial part here is how big is the gap between a
         | proposee's worst and best match: if the gap is null for all
         | proposees, there isn't any strategic incentive for one to lie
         | about their preferences. However, that obviously is a very hard
         | requirement.
        
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